My Country is This Dirt

Monday, another of those days allowing time in the afternoon to browse aimlessly in a couple of poetry collections, eye out for a shaping of words that grabs attention, a voice speaking in a personal language of the heart, shared thoughts worth pondering.

Ellie Schoenfeld is a native of Duluth, Minnesota, and the author of three poetry collections: Screaming Red Gladiolus! (1999), Difficult Valentines (2004) and The Dark Honey: New and Used Poems (2009). Her work has twice been featured on Garrison Keillor’s The Writer’s Almanac. Schoenfeld co-founded Poetry Harbor in Duluth and is a past recipient of an ARAC/McKnight Artist Fellowship. Screaming Red Gladiolus! was nominated for a Northeastern Minnesota Book Award. The poems below are both from the 2009 collection, The Dark Honey. The first is a wonderfully uncommon take on the hard-to-define concept of patriotism, something surely more than a Pledge of Allegiance and American flag in the front yard.

PATRIOTISM

My country is this dirt
that gathers under my fingernails
when I am in the garden.
The quiet bacteria and fungi,
all the little insects and bugs
are my compatriots. They are
idealistic, always working together
for the common good.
I kneel on the earth
and pledge my allegiance
to all the dirt of the world,
to all of that soil which grows
flowers and food
for the just and unjust alike.
The soil does not care
what we think about or who we love.
It knows our true substance,
of what we are really made.
I stand my ground on this ground,
this ground which will
ultimately
recruit us all
to its side.

And next a plain unadorned Steinbeck view of passing time in a laundromat among ordinary people.

I RIDE GREYHOUND

because it’s like being

in a John Steinbeck novel.

Next best thing is the laundromat.

That’s where all people

who would be on the bus if they had the money

hang out. This is my crowd.

Tonight there are cleaning people appalled

at the stupidity of anyone

who would put powder detergent

in the clearly marked LIQUID ONLY slot.

The couple by the vending machine

are fondling each other.

You’d think the orange walls

and florescent lights

would dampen that energy

but it doesn’t seem to.

It’s a singles scene here on Saturday nights.

I confide to the fellow next to me

that I suspect I’m being taken

in by the triple loader,

maybe it doesn’t hold any more

than the regular machines

but I’m paying an extra fifty cents.

I tell him this meaningfully

holding handfuls of underwear.

He claims the triple loader

gives a better wash.

I don’t ask why,

just cruise over to the pop machine,

aware that my selection

may provide a subtle clue.

I choose Wild Berry,

head back to my clothes.

Perfume and Oranges

During the Reconstruction years following the Civil War, in a building dating from 1832 two New Orleans sisters opened a notions shop at 613 Royale Street in the French Quarter. The structure included three stories, an attic, and a generous inner courtyard. Members of a proud and aristocratic Creole family, Emma and Bertha Camors outfitted many of the city’s finest women with formal gowns, lace and perfumes imported from Paris. Today, the former notions shop is a restaurant set in a large wisteria covered courtyard named Court of Two Sisters.

The poem below, “The Court of the Two Sisters” is from Phillip Lopate’s recent book of poetry, At the End of the Day (2010) and brings together the majority of his poems, most written during his youth. Lopate describes it this way: “Though I am known today mostly as an essayist, occasionally as a fiction writer, for about fifteen years I wrote poetry…When I look back at those years during which poetry formed such an important part of my identity, I am tempted to rub my eyes, as though recalling a time when I ran off and joined the circus.” He is also the author of numerous essay collections, including: Notes on Sontag (2009), Portrait of My Body (1996), Against Joie de Vivre (1989), and Bachelorhood (1981). Getting Personal (2003) includes both the writer’s prose and poetry.

THE COURT OF THE TWO SISTERS

The slow green fans turning in the courtyard

Of the classy restaurant in New Orleans;

The green napkins and the Negro waiters

Advancing in their bright green uniforms, superiorly

Filling the large water goblets dusty in the sun.

The hot rolls with curled butter shells like snails

And the enormous breakfasts served at all hours

Of Eggs with lemon sauce, asparagus, ham and toast points;

Cold creamed shrimp soup, oranges.

I read two newspapers at once, starting with sports;

Crowding the tablecloth with unwanted sections.

And when I was too stuffed to go on

I ordered a chickory coffee, dark and bitter

And a Charlotte Russe bursting with whipped cream.

Fancy Shower Curtains

Idle Sunday, hours of no account, eyes aimed at blue waves and summer, mind seeing another side of the world. Late in the afternoon, the bright red of another Garrison Keillor anthology caught my eye and after a dull poem or three, I stumbled upon a diamond, or at least another view of department store sales. Here is a poem by Faith Shearin from her 2002 collection The Owl Collection.

SHOPPING

My husband and I stood together in the new mall

which was clean and white and full of possibility.
We were poor so we liked to walk through the stores

since this was like walking through our dreams.

In one we admired coffee makers, blue pottery

bowls, toaster ovens as big as televisions. In another,

we eased into a leather couch and imagined

cocktails in a room overlooking the sea. When we

sniffed scented candles we saw our future faces,

softly lit, over a dinner of pasta and wine. When

we touched thick bathrobes we saw midnight

swims and bathtubs so vast they might be

mistaken for lakes. My husband’s glasses hurt

his face and his shoes were full of holes.

There was space in our living room where

a couch should have been. We longed for

fancy shower curtains, flannel sheets,

shiny silverware, expensive winter coats.

Sometimes, at night, we sat up and made lists.

We pressed our heads together and wrote
Our wants all over torn notebook pages.

Nearly everyone we loved was alive and we

were in love but we like wanting. Nothing

was ever as nice when we brought it home.

The objects in stores looked best in stores.

The stores were possible futures and, young

and poor, we went shopping. It was nice

then: we didn’t know we already had everything.

A good poem, wouldn’t you say?

Faith Shearin’s first book of poems was The Owl Question, published in 2002. A second collection, The Empty House, came out in 2008. Her more recent work has appeared in North American Review and Sweeping Beauty: Contemporary Women Poets Do Housework. Ms Shearin is a recipient of a 2009 NEA fellowship and lives in North Carolina.

Streetwise But Foolish

A little over a week ago here in the Scriblets pages was a sort of mini-spotlight on poet Dorianne Laux and her marvelous poem, “Homicide Detective: A Film Noir.” The poem is one of thirty-six in Laux’s most recent collection, The Book of Men, published last February. I first read the poem in The Writer’s Almanac and hugely impressed, ordered a copy of the new collection without delay. I got the book two or three days later and have since then read and reread the poems again and again, probably boring friends by even reading one or two poems out loud. But isn’t most poetry meant to be read aloud anyway, even to ourselves?

The poetry of Dorianne Laux has affected me more strongly than any I’ve read in some time. In words better than my own poet B.H. Fairchild said, ‘In The Book of Men our recognition of a drifting world brought to the hard edge of meaning is immediate and enduring and makes us grateful once again for poetry’s capacity for rescue.’ From the book’s front flap, these words go directly to the heart and kernel of Laux’s writing.

The poem below is another from The Book of Men, one called “The Mysterious Human Heart in New York.” The poem originally appeared in Dark Charms, a 2009 chapbook of Ms Laux’s poems from Red Dragonfly Press.

THE MYSTERIOUS HUMAN HEART IN NEW YORK

Streetwise but foolish, the heart

knows what’s good for it but goes

for the dark bar, the beer before noon,

the doughy pretzel hot and salty, tied up

in a Gordian knot. It takes a walk

through Tompkins Square where

the homeless sleep it off on stone benches,

one shrouded body to each gritty sarcophagus.

The streets fill with taxis and trucks,

pinstripes and briefcases, and the subways

spark and sway underground. The sun

is snagged on the Empire State, performing

its one-note song, the citizens below

dragging their shadows down the sidewalk

like sidekicks, spitting into the gutter

as if on cue, as if in a musical,

as if there’s no association between the trash

flapping against the chain link and the girl

with her skirt up in the alley. When the traffic

jams on 110th—a local pain, a family affair—

the Starbucks junkie leans against the glass

and laughs into his hand, a cabbie

sits on his hood and smokes, cops

on skates weave through the exhaust,

billy club blunts bumping against their

dark blue thighs. Everyone’s on a cell phone,

the air a-buzz with yammer and electricity

as the heart of the city pounds like a man

caught in the crosswalk holding his shoulder,

going down on one knee, then blundering

into Central Park to lean over the addled bridge,

the sooty swans floating under him, grown fat

on cheap white bread. Oh heart, with your

empty pockets and your hat on backwards,

stop looking at yourself in the placid waters.

Someone is sneaking up behind you

in an overcoat lined with watches,

and someone else is holding a cardboard sign

that says: The End Is Here.

Heart of Homicide

Dorianne Laux was born in Augusta, Maine in 1952. Before getting a B.A. in English from Mills College in 1988 she spent time working as a sanatorium cook, a gas station manager, a maid, and a donut holer. Since 1990 she has published five collections of poetry, the most recent, The Book of Men, published in February of this year. “Homicide Detective: A Film Noir” is a poem from The Book of Men that was recently showcased on The Writer’s Almanac. Title is enough to warn us this isn’t a poem about moonbeams and marigolds, and if Wordsworth is your ideal poet it might be good to stop here. Ms Laux’s is a vision well served by its dark crime scene splatter of greasy words.

HOMICIDE DETECTIVE: A FILM NOIR

Smell of diesel fuel and dead trees
on a flatbed soaked to the bone.
Smell of dusty heater coils.
We got homicides in motels and apartments
all across the city: under the beds,
behind the doors, in the bathtubs.
It’s where I come in at 5 AM,
paper cup of coffee dripping
down my sleeve, powdered
half-moon donut in my mouth.
Blood everywhere. Bodies
belly down, bodies faceup
on the kitchenette floor.
¿Donde esta? Que Sera.
We got loose ends, we got
dead ends, we got split ends,
hair in the drains, fingerprints
on glass. This is where I stand,
my hat glittery with rain,
casting my restless shadow.

These are the dark hours,
dark times are these, hours
when the clock chimes once
as if done with it, tired of it: the sun,
the highways, the damnable
flowers strewn on the fake wool rug.

These are the flayed heart’s flowers,
oil-black dahlias big as fists,
stems thick as wrists, striped, torn,
floating in the syrupy left-on music
but the bright world is done and I’m
a ghost touching the hair of the dead
with a gloved hand.

These are the done-for, the poor,
the defenseless, mostly women,
felled trees, limbs lashing
up into air, into rain,
as if time were nothing, hours,
clocks, highways, faces, don't step
on the petals, the upturned hands, stay
behind the yellow tape, let
the photographer’s hooded camera pass,
the coroner in his lab coat, the DA
in her creased black pants.

Who thought
to bring these distracting flowers?
Who pushed
out the screen and broke the lock?
Who let him in?
Who cut the phone cord, the throat,
the wrist, the cake
on a plate and sat down and ate
only half?

What good is my life if I can’t read the clues,
my mind the glue and each puzzle piece
chewed by the long-gone dog who raced
through the door, ran through our legs
and knocked over the vase,
hurtled down the alley and into the street?

What are we but meat, flesh
and the billion veins to be bled?
Why do we die this way, our jaws
open, our eyes bulging, as if there
were something to see or say?
Though today the flowers speak to me,
they way they sprawl in the streaked light,
their velvet lips and lids opening as I watch,
as if they wanted to go on living, climb
my pant legs, my wrinkled shirt, reach up
past my throat and curl over my mouth,
my eyes. Bury me in bloom.

The Scent of Roses

Tuesday was a half-day of horrendous traffic across what seemed like most of central Florida, and by the end of it I was ready to swear off driving and seclude myself in a cloister of quiet calm. My houseguest returned to Tokyo today and halfway to the airport we encountered a crash on the interstate that slowed everything to a crawl before detouring all traffic in a wide loop that had us worrying about reaching the airport in time. Avoiding the interstate on the return trip I ran into the same thing on an alternate route back to the beach. Those several hours of fractious driving among tailgating madmen left me eager to park the car, put my feet up and with a quiet view of the ocean read something of a soothing nature. And that’s just the way it turned out.

Robert Bly is the author of twenty-two collections of poetry and has translated thirteen books of poetry as well as one novel. The translations are from Swedish, Norwegian, German, Spanish, Persian and Urdu. He is also the author of nine non-fiction books. Mr Bly won a National Book Award for Poetry with his 1967 collection, The Light Around the Body. He describes his writing as a wish to describe modern American life through powerful metaphors and intense imagery. In 2006 the University of Minnesota purchased Mr Bly’s archive, more than 80,000 pages of handwritten manuscript, his journal spanning nearly fifty years and his correspondence. The university paid a price of $775,000 to acquire this archive. The poem below is from a collection to be published in May, Talking Into the Ear of a Donkey.

THE BLIND OLD MAN

I don't know why so much sweetness hovers around us.
Nor why the wind blows the curtains in the afternoons,
Nor why the earth mutters so much about its children.

We'll never know why the snow falls through the night,
Nor how the heron stretches her long legs,
Nor why we feel so abandoned in the morning.

We have never understood how birds manage to fly,
Nor who the genius is who makes up dreams,
Nor how heaven and earth can appear in a poem.

We don't know why the rain falls so long.
The ditchdigger turns up one shovel after another.
The herons go on stitching the heavens together.

We've never heard about the day we were conceived
Nor the doctor who helped us to be born,
Nor that blind old man who decides when we will die.

It's hard to understand why the sun rises,
And why our children are mostly fond of us,
And why the wind blows the curtains in the afternoon.

A highly regarded poet, Ted Kooser was the US Poet Laureate from 2004-2006. For his book of poems, Delights and Shadows (2004) he won the 2005 Pulitzer Prize. Mr Kooser is the Presidential Professor of English at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln and the author of twelve full-length collections of poetry. In reviewing his 1994 collection, Weather Central, from which “A Ghost Story” is taken, The Bloomsbury Review described Kooser this way: ‘He sits on his porch, uninterested in academic cant or the fashions of poetic schools, and takes in the world around, praising its quiet beauty…’

A GHOST STORY

Her life was plain, her death
a common death—a girl
sewn into the watery shroud
of pneumonia. She was only
another Mary, there
in Illinois, and it was only
another April—the buds
of the honeysuckle folded
in prayer. Forgotten eyes,
forgotten smile, the cowlick
in her hair forgotten;
everything gone. Yet for
seventy years her grave
gave off the scent of roses.

All About Waitresses

A few days ago The Writer’s Almanac included a poem by Elliot Fried. It’s one that impressed me, and right from the gate, here it is.

DAILY I FALL IN LOVE WITH WAITRESSES

Daily I fall in love with waitresses
with their white bouncing name tags
KATHY MARGIE HONEY SUE
and white rubber shoes.
I love how they bend over tables
pouring coffee.
Their perky breasts hover above potatoes
like jets coming in to LAX
hang above the suburbs—
shards of broken stars.
I feel their fingers
roughened by cube steaks softened with grease
slide over me.
Their hands and lean long bodies
keep moving so…
fumbling and clattering so harmoniously
that I am left overwhelmed, quivering.
Daily I fall in love with waitresses
with their cream-cheese cool.
They tell secrets in the kitchen
and I want them.
I know them.
They press buttons creases burgers buns—
their legs are menu smooth.

They have boyfriends or husbands or children
or all.
They are french dressing worldly—
they know how ice cubes clink.
Their chipped teeth form chipped beef
and muffin syllabics.
Daily I fall in love with waitresses.
They are Thousand Island dreams
but they never stand still long enough
as they serve serve serve.

Elliot Fried was an unfamiliar name and I made a point of looking for information about him, as well as other examples of his work. That proved to be hard work. Here is the sum total I managed to dredge up…

Elliot Fried got his MFA in creative writing from the University of California at Irvine. He is currently (?) a professor of creative writing at California State University at Long Beach. He has published two collections of poetry, Marvel Mystery Oil (1991) from which the above poem comes, The Man Who Owned Cars (1994) and has also edited three anthologies: Amorotica, Men Talk, and Gridlock. Co-founder of the Long Beach Poetry Festival, his poems as well as fiction have been included in anthologies and magazines. Since 1995 four of his poems have been spotlighted in The Writer’s Almanac.

None of his collections or anthologies are currently available, or in print. When BookFinder.com offers no match for an Elliot Fried book search, you are pretty much at a dead end.

As for the poem above, no ‘literary’ remarks are required; no commentary necessary. A good poem simply because the poet makes facile and entertaining use of food words to convey story and picture.

The Sum of Man

Though she has published three collections of her poems, Nora Pollard has yet to receive the notice she deserves. I look about some in the shelves of modern poetry at my library and bookstore and never come across her name. As a subscriber to The Writer’s Almanac, it was there I first read something by Nora Pollard. She has been chosen four times to lead off their daily newsletter with one of her poems. Unfortunately, clicking on Amazon won’t work if you want to buy a collection of her poetry. You’ll have better luck at Antrim House.

Nora Pollard is the daughter of Red Pollard, recently brought to our attention by Laura Hillenbrand, author of the bestselling book, Seabiscuit. The poet’s father was the jockey who rode Seabiscuit throughout his glory days on the horse racing circuit. The few available bios of Nora Pollard tell us that even now she earns her living working at a steel company in Connecticut, and has in the past been folksinger, waitress, nanny, teacher, solderer and calligrapher. Her three collections are: Leaning In (2003), Report from the Banana Hospital (2005) and Death & Rapture in the Animal Kingdom (2009). The poem here is from the last.

THE SUM OF MAN

by Norah Pollard

In autumn,
facing the end of his life,
he moved in with me.
We piled his belongings—
his army-issue boots, knife magazines,
Steely Dan tapes, his grinder, drill press,
sanders, belts and hacksaws—
in a heap all over the living room floor.
For two weeks he walked around the mess.

One night he stood looking down at it all
and said: “The sum total of my existence.”
Emptiness in his voice.

Soon after, as if the sum total
needed to be expanded, he began to place
things around in the closets and spaces I’d
cleared for him, and when he'd finished
setting up his workshop in the cellar, he said,
“I should make as many knives as I can,”
and he began to work.

The months plowed on through a cold winter.
In the evenings, we’d share supper, some tale
of family, some laughs, perhaps a walk in the snow.
Then he’d nip back down into the cellar’s keep
To saw and grind and polish,
creating his beautiful knives
until he grew too weak to work.
But still he’d slip down to stand at his workbench
and touch his woods
and run his hand over his lathe.

One night he came up from the cellar
and stood in the kitchen’s warmth
and, shifting his weight
from one foot to the other, said,
“I love my workshop.”
Then he went up to bed.

He’s gone now.
It’s spring. It’s been raining for weeks.
I go down to his shop and stand in the dust
of ground steel and shavings of wood.
I think on how he’d speak of his dying, so
easily, offhandedly, as if it were
a coming anniversary or
an appointment with the moon.
I touch his leather apron, folded for all time,
and his glasses set upon his work gloves.
I take up an unfinished knife and test its heft,
and feel as well the heft of my grief for
this man, this brother I loved,
the whole of him so much greater
than the sum of his existence.